Ideas

In one of his earliest boyhood memories, Dion Neutra walked out the front door of his family's Silver Lake home and down to the water's edge. It was the early 1930s, and the wall around Silver Lake Reservoir was so low that he could fling a fishing line above it and into the water. But over the next eight decades, the architect - who trained under his father, Richard Neutra, a master of Modernism who lived and worked out of Silver Lake - watched as the water he loved began to change.

"You've probably never seen worse financials in any company that's taken a public offering." That's the assessment of Corporate Capital Resources in Westlake Village--not from a disgruntled shareholder, but from the company's founder and president, Daniel D. Weston. : CorpCap was set up as a publicly traded venture-capital firm that would invest in new companies with terrific ideas in exchange for a stake in those businesses.

B.F. Skinner, sometimes likened to Hitler and shunned for decades in a fearful, skeptical world, still dreams of saving the human race. But the famous psychologist has grown pessimistic with age. At 82, the father of a behavior modification technique that he calls operant conditioning knows that it is probably already too late to see his hope of a society made better through positive reinforcement come true. He is not so sure anymore that it ever will.

The words are familiar: venture capital, start-up needs, problem-solving, leverage, entrepreneurs, change makers, path-breakers. But the context in which Bill Drayton uses them to describe the Ashoka Society is not. He uses them to describe the society's search for and support of people working in public-service jobs in developing countries who have good ideas that can bring about social change.

JOHN SIMM was fine as a pinched-faced crusading journalist in the BBC's political thriller "State of Play." But wouldn't the sun-kissed Brad Pitt work better in the film version? The soccer soap "Footballers' Wives" was a hoot on BBC America. But wouldn't more U.S. viewers watch if it were about American football?

If we have the Great Depression to thank for inventions such as the Twinkie, Monopoly and the photocopier, this recession may be remembered for inspiring a biodegradable shower mat, a tie that holds iPods and a gadget that breaks the vacuum seals of jars. That's because some self-starters among the ranks of the unemployed, sick of trudging off to job fairs and sending out resumes, are starting businesses to finally launch that invention they've been mulling over for years.

Peter Berg is a morning person. This morning, Berg, who is probably best known as Dr. Billy Kronk in "Chicago Hope," is sitting in the office of Dr. Robert Berger, who is the real-life director of the Forensic Psychiatry Service at Bellevue Hospital Center. Around a corner and down the hallway, behind several sets of bars and a phalanx of police, is a psychiatric ward. Inside are 27 of the most dangerous people in New York.

David Seidler first sparked to the idea of writing a movie about the life of King George VI in 1980. A stutterer himself, he found the real-life narrative of the English monarch's struggles to overcome a debilitating stammer moving and profoundly relatable, but Seidler understood that it wasn't going to be easy to see his script turned into a feature film. First, he had to wait for the Queen Mum to die; he had asked the royal matriarch for her blessing to tell her husband's story, and she had requested that he wait until after her passing, since the memories of that time were still too painful.

"In America," Oscar Wilde quipped, "the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience. " And they often do it in the pages of Rolling Stone. Last week, the magazine posted a mini-manifesto titled " Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For . " After confirming it wasn't a parody, conservative critics launched a brutal assault on its author, Jesse A. Myerson. Myerson's essay captures nearly everything the unconverted despise about left-wing youth culture, starting with the assumption that being authentically young requires being theatrically left wing.

Academic and author Noam Chomsky is a creative but very structural thinker, stringing ideas together like dominoes. One thought progresses to the next, carefully placed with a logic and precision born of years of linguistics analysis shoring up each one. Filmmaker Michel Gondry is a creative thinker as well, though he's more deconstructive in his methods. Enthralled by the process of pulling ideas apart, he's not content with tipping a single domino, but crashing the entire pile, then setting about to make sense of the jumble.